Abstract

Mary Edwards Walker was a highly principled and passionate reformer who refused to recognise the oppressive social conventions of 19th-century America. At the time, women's educational opportunities were limited and hard to access, their legal status inferior to that of men, and their right to vote denied. Fashion dictated that they lace themselves into tight corsets under voluminous skirts and petticoats that compromised their health and freedom of movement. She would have none of it. Qualifying as a doctor in 1855—only 6 years after the first woman doctor in the USA, Elizabeth Blackwell—Walker campaigned for dress reform and wore trousers, sometimes under knee-length skirts, throughout her adult life. “The greatest sorrows from which women suffer today”, she wrote, “are those physical, moral and mental ones, that are caused by their unhygienic manner of dressing!” Walker's feminism extended to the battlefield: she served as a military surgeon in the American Civil War and received the Medal of Honor. Women making medical history: introducing A Woman's PlaceIn December, 2017, The Lancet issued a call for papers for its special theme issue on women in science, medicine, and global health .1 The Comment outlined the gender inequalities in medicine that still persist, long after many overt barriers to women's participation have fallen. While that theme issue will be forward-looking, I believe we can also gain insights from looking to the past for examples of women who have made their mark against the odds, and by asking what it was about their particular circumstances that enabled them to do so. Full-Text PDF Rukhmabai: doctor and social reformerStraddling a faultline between tradition and progressive education in 19th-century British India, Rukhmabai forced legislators to reconsider laws on the status of girls, and went on to forge her own career as a doctor—one of the first Indian women to practise in her country. She was quick to generalise her own experience of injustice as a Hindu woman to the predicament of all her fellow countrywomen, and was an outspoken social reformer. Full-Text PDF

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